Yahoo is cutting more fat today by closing its travel bargains website FareChase, which it originally acquired back in July 2004 and re-launched two years later. The company will be announcing the shut-down later today, and will start redirecting visitors of the service to its main travel site soon.
The service let customers perform comparative searches for pricing on flights, hotels, cruises and cars, but it was apparently not enough of a strategic product enhancement for Yahoo Travel, hence the company discontinuing it altogether to tighten its focus and cut costs in these difficult times.
Sounds like a plan to me.
According to Travel Weekly, Yahoo signed a new agreement with partner Travelocity in late February 2009, ensuring that the latter could continue its role as the primary booking engine for Yahoo Travel. In the past, Travelocity sparred with Yahoo over the prominent role that Yahoo gave FareChase on Yahoo Travel.
This is the latest deadpool decision from Yahoo in a long series of announcements.
The company had previously sold off shopping engine Kelkoo and shuttered online storage service Briefcase, photo sharing service Yahoo Photos, social network Mash, live video streaming service Yahoo Live, Ads in RSS, web-based video editing service JumpCut and student community website / job board KickStart.
Which service could be next on the chopping block?
Good for Yahoo cutting the fat will create stronger Yahoo property.
iscontinue
thanks, fixed
mybloglog is next …. this stupid yahoo is going no where …
This is the first time I’ve heard of FareChase. Probably not a good sign.
FareChase did find me bette deals than Travelocity or Kayak on a number of occasions
er, that’s probably why they’re shutting it down. I don’t think Facechase was affiliate linked, but clearly their Travelocity deal on Y! Travel is
Kelkoo being sold, Farechase being axed… What is the future of Yahoo! Shopping US ? It seems Yahoo! doesn’t believe anymore in transactional websites…
Nicolas – Farechase was completely free for the travel suppliers and only made money through advertising. This is much different than Y! Shopping, which makes a good chunk of change through their merchant referrals, in addition to advertising.
I would say competition is WAY TOO HIGH in this area, and it’s simply better to concentrate efforts on something rather than trying to be everywhere …
Why buy all these companies just to shut the down? The personals business is a good candidate for the chopping block. Totally agree that their shopping business must be on the list too.
‘coud’ typo
thanks, fixed.
isn’t one of the benefits of blogging to not have to worry about a typo here and there?….
To think that farechase was one the really better sites on Yahoo that I used.
Try Farecast, it should be familiar to FareChase users and offers some nice extra features: http://farecast.live.com/
ooo .. microsoft fanboy!!
or LowFares
FareChase and Farecast always sounded far too similar to me – could never remember who owned whom.
Shame that Y! discontinued the site, though. I wonder if they’re retaining any of the technology without the branding or just dropping it all together due to advertising conflicts.
The site failed because it didn’t do a very good job actually providing good deals. Anyone ready to invest the time to hunt for a good deal is going to make the effort to use a few different sites.
Farecast has had the same issues in my experience.
If you’re going to deliver a deal locating service – make sure it actually delivers good deals, not overpriced junk.
You apparently never used Farechase, then. It ALWAYS found the best deal for me, no exceptions.
When I book travel, I go crazy and look under every rock and drive my wife nuts. I usually spend a good straight month booking a trip. And even so, while it was in existence, I never found a better deal than Farchase did within seconds.
I referred my whole family to the site, and they were always amazed by how much cheaper even the same exact flight was on Farechase than any other site.
Farecast is not the same simply because it never finds particularly better deals than other sites.
Yahoo has got to be one of the worst run companies in history. They buy up perfectly good sites and ruin them (Geocities, Flickr, etc.) but then they have something GOLD like Farechase and they kill it.
So, FareChase is being shut down by Yahoo. More traction for Kayak now which has some nice features of Farechase anyway
Impressive results from that site.
I was booking air travel a couple of days ago and it took me quite a bit of work to find an ideal itinerary. It’s unfortunate they are closing.
This site returned a comparable itinerary automatically at a minimal price difference. However, I live near 3 major airports, which makes things a little more trickier when creating different points of departure and return.
Not good for users…
I was using this service a lot and each time it got me better deals then kayak. sad.
Some good deals on here too.
Hmm. MyWeb2 is also shuttered and urged with Yahoo! Bookmarks..
There are sites of nature that amaze, startle and leave you gasping for breath— and then there are awesome creations like Château de Chillon, that force you to glare at them without batting your eyelids while being transported into a new world.
That website was great, it always had the cheapest flights and was constatntly updating them as you sat there. I was just on it on Tues. and when I went today and it was gone I was irritated!!! Yahoo travel results are not near the prices I was getting on Farechase. LAME!!!
Facechase was WAY better than Kayak or Travelocity. Just shows new management isn’t going to help the Yahoo trainwreck.
Yahoo’s new profile system seems pretty pointless. Mash was basically Facebook Lite and the new profile system is Mash Lite.
Half of Yahoo’s services I’ve never even heard of. Bix? Green? Shine?
Yahoo still hasn’t heeded the infamous peanut butter manifesto.
Yahoo´s M&A strategy is ´buy and kill´. No wonder none of their acquisitions has been so fruitful.
It is terrible lost for all, who used it!!! It was the best what Yahoo had!!!!
The new Yahoo Travel is the worst from all well known websites.
Does anyone know another website the closest to FareChase we lost?